The Change Hurricane Irma Brings

Waves from Hurricane Irma assail Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Saturday morning, as the storm makes landfall in low-lying south Florida.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty

No square inch of the Florida Keys is more than twenty feet above sea
level. As Hurricane Irma approached this week, experts predicted that
the sea would surge by between five and ten feet. Evacuations were
ordered days ago, though some residents stayed, and by Sunday morning
the National Weather Service’s Key West station was tweeting out last
minute advice to anyone still uncertain: “***EVERYONE IN THE FLORIDA
KEYS*** / *** IT’S TIME TO HUNKER DOWN.***” Lobsters headed for
deeper waters. A pair of parrots sought shelter on a twenty-second-story
windowsill at a Miami hotel. In Key West, the few people who had
remained gave sun-blasted, blustery interviews to local reporters. A man
posed for photographs in swimming trunks and flippers and said that he
was planning to rescue anyone who needed rescuing. A Key West resident
named Chris Bergh, who on Thursday had evacuated to a high point midway
up the Florida peninsula called Lake Wales Ridge, took stock of the
situation from there. “People are complicated,” he said.

Bergh has a long view of the Keys. He is an ecologist, in charge of the
Nature Conservancy’s work in South Florida, especially the group’s
efforts to protect the vast coral reef that runs through and beyond the
Keys. Bergh grew up in the Keys, and has been skindiving in these waters
since the nineteen-seventies. He remembers a time when the coral came so
close to the surface that you worried it would scrape your belly as you
swam by. Swimmers don’t worry about this anymore. The increasing warmth
and acidity of the oceans have prompted the coral to recede, and have
converted pine woods along the Keys’ coasts into mangrove ones. The
naturalist’s disposition is generally toward what endures, but to have
watched the environment in South Florida recently, Bergh said, is to be
in awe of how much has changed “before my eyes, in the span of one human
lifetime.”

Across Florida this week, the stress of an approaching hurricane has
been accompanied by a feeling that things will not simply reset
afterward, that the storm is not a one-off. The politics of climate
change are as complicated in Florida as anywhere else in the country,
but perhaps it is easier to see a pattern when facing the country’s
second cataclysmic storm within a week. “If this isn’t climate change, I
don’t know what is,” Miami’s Republican mayor, Tomas Regalado, said
Friday. “This is truly, truly a poster child for what is to come.” To
the east of his city, the Army Corps of Engineers recently finished
pouring two hundred and twenty thousand cubic yards of sand onto the
beaches, to replenish what is being lost to erosion. “This is a lesson
that we need protection from nature,” Regalado said. It was that, but it
was also a reminder that nature needs protection from us, too.

From the comparative high ground (at least in Florida terms) of the Lake
Wales Ridge, Bergh described what has already changed in the Keys, and
how Irma might complicate the situation further. The Keys’ reef sits
especially close to a large human population, as reefs go, and so it is
under regular assault from wastewater, from dropped anchors and lobster
traps, from ordinary traumas and pollution that can break off limestone
coral. It is under further pressure, these days, from blights of coral
bleaching, and from a devastating disease that is thought to also be
related to the changing conditions of the ocean and is progressing south
along the reef. In many places, for reasons that also remain mysterious,
coral has been replaced by an anemone called Palythoa, which blankets
reefs without excreting the limestone skeleton that grows the coral. In
the generally flat and featureless underwater landscape of the
Carribbean, reefs are places where life congregates. The coral cover is
now less than half what it was since when Bergh started his work on
reefs. “You used to knock down a reef and the reef rebounded,” Bergh
said. “Now it’s harder for the reef to rebound.”

Hurricanes accelerate these changes. Huge waves, cohering in the wind,
shatter the coral. Sand from the ocean floor, kicked up by the tumult,
further abrades it—just as sandblasting might, Bergh said. His current
project is to try to replenish the reef by growing coral onshore and
then transporting it offshore, in the same way that you might try to
regrow a forest. But the faster-growing corals he uses in this project
are also those most at risk of being broken in a storm. Later this week,
once Hurricane Irma moves on, the waves recede, and the sand settles,
Bergh will be out on the reef once more, inspecting the damage. Until
then, there is just the certainty of change, the knowledge that the
Keys, shaken by the storm, will come out differently than they were
before.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.